Best of the SJGames Forums: Sources for GURPS Dungeon Fantasy

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 A lot of people, including myself in the past, have assumed that GURPS Dungeon Fantasy is GURPS's take on Dungeons and Dragons. However, Sean "Kromm" Punch, who wrote the first four titles in the series, says this has been greatly overestimated, and in fact the biggest influence was video games:

D&D – especially AD&D – was an influence on DF but not the dominant one. (I'd put it third behind Diablo II and NetHack, probably, and tied with Tunnels & Trolls.)

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I haven't played any version of D&D since the early 1980s... Inasmuch as it was influenced by other games, those would be computer games I played in the intervening decades, principally NetHack and the Diablo series. Inasmuch as tabletop games were an influence, I've played more hours of Tunnels & Trolls than any other FRPG. 

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My top influences were probably Tunnels & Trolls First Edition (1975), the venerable Rogue (1980) and NetHack (1987) computer games, and the more recent Diablo series of computer games (1997-2023), any one of which got more hours of my time than all editions of D&D put together.

Up until 1979, T&T had no explicit setting, and most development in that direction came decades after my time playing it. Rogue and NetHack were essentially procedurally generated, and while they had lore, they didn't have any world outside the dungeon. The Diablo games had even more lore, and some towns where you could shop, but were still procedurally generated dungeon crawls.

The closest D&D-related influences would be the rules for rolling up random dungeons in Appendix A of the Dungeon Master's Guide, First Edition (1979) and the Neverwinter Nights: Infinite Dungeons video game (2006).

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In one post, he also mentions cinematic and literary influences:

There were a fair few cinematic influences. The least-terrible were probably Conan the Barbarian (1982) and Conan the Destroyer (1984). I also got a few ideas from Excalibur (1981), Ladyhawke (1985), and even The Princess Bride (1987). But there's also Red Sonja (1985) . . . and even the terribleness of the likes of Hawk the Slayer (1980), Krull (1983), The Sword and the Sorcerer (1982), and The Warrior and the Sorceress (1984). You could sum it up as "1980s fantasy with muscle-bound barbarians, generic Olden Times technology, and women in cheesecake armor, with a dash of idealized chivalry and a soupçon of swashbuckling."

There were fewer literary influences because dungeon crawls aren't a strong literary trope. I'd be lying if I left out The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but beyond that I didn't much dip into novels. However, my view of "town" swipes a lot from the Thieves' World stories, and I know that wherever Peter Dell'Orto's hand is visible in Dungeon Fantasy, the Black Company isn't all that far away.

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I confess until recently I had no exposure to any of the mentioned video games, or most of the movies for that matter (save the first Conan movie and The Princess Bride). This inspired me to pick up NetHack recently and there's been some revelations—I have to suspect Caverntown was probably inspired by NetHack's Minetown, and that the Eyes of Death in the first Dungeon Fantasy Monsters book were inspired by NetHack's floating eyes. And just today we got a new DFRPG adventure whose backstory mentions "ascension", the goal of NetHack.

More broadly, I'm starting to suspect it's under-appreciated how much of the relationship between TTRPGs and CRPGs has been a two-way conversation. By some accounts, the first procedurally-generated dungeoncrawler came out in 1978, before the first edition AD&D Gamemaster's Guide!

Comments

  1. Based CosmoMay 30, 2026 at 3:28 PM

    NetHack is one of my all-time favorite Roguelikes, and I always smile at a quote in the DFRPG/DF series that comes from NetHack. It really shows that it is a clear inspiration.

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